Acclaimed as “a Canadian who inspires the world” (Maclean's Magazine) and a “nation builder” (The Globe and Mail), Jean Vanier is the founder of the international movement of L'Arche communities, where people who have developmental disabilities and the friends who assist them create homes and share life together. (http://www.larche.ca/en/jean_vanier/biography )
When Jesus calls us forth, he never calls us alone. He calls forth a family of people, a community growing together in the gradual recognition that we are brothers and sister in the Lord, and that love is binding us together. Community doesn’t only mean living under the same roof. A community of love is a beautiful reality. Communes are born and die rapidly because people don’t know much about the laws of community.
When you go into some communities you sense immediate warmth, peace, a deep feeling of security. There is so much love radiated. You find it in the eyes, in the smile, in the nonverbal communication. You go into other communities, and you find long faces and people not talking to each other. They are deathly polite. Jesus says, “They will know you are my disciples by the unity, the love, the joy, the peaces that flows out from you” (John 13:35). This is the sign of the presence of the disciples of Jesus.
Our community is one of suffering. But it is also a community of joy. Joy will only flow from suffering. A community where there are no crises, no suffering, is probably not a good community. Forming community requires time and suffering. Community is the passage of the majority of people from their own personal interests to community interests; to life from a consciousness of my needs to a consciousness of the group. It is when the majority are beginning to enter into a world of love where they are prepared to die for one another.
A community is not people who have agreed to obey certain rules. We know that people can live in proper etiquette of community without having community. Community is something deeper. Like love, it comes into being through gradual growth.
I have watched a number of communities grow and suffer. During the first period of time everybody is happy. Men and women who have been deeply wounded come from a lonely, unhappy situation and suddenly find people sharing. They think it is great: everybody is a saint and everything is fantastic.
The next few months everybody is a devil. During the first months you could accept not having the biggest piece of meat, or not looking at the television program you like. But then you discover that they are looking at all the unintelligent programs and that they never want to watch the ones that you want to look at. Whenever you want to go to the toilet, they are in the bathroom. This is everyday life. They are always eating spaghetti and peanut butter sandwiches. They accentuate religion too much. For awhile religion is great, but not when it is everyday. That is fanatical.
The second stage, the period of deception, is the crucial moment. It is when my desires are such that I want to see my program and I want my spaghetti. So we say, “Let’s humor everybody.” We will have two television sets. Thos who want channel number one can go here, channel number two can go there. And we will have self-service so that those who want spaghetti can have spaghetti, those who want fish can have fish, those who want something else can have something else. Then everybody is satisfied. But then we are no longer a community; we are a hotel.
You have to work at community day by day. During the first stage, the stage of excitement, which is an illusion, you see something which you think is fantastic. Then you get into the period of deception. Finally, through commitment, you come to a moment of reality. During the period of illusion and deception, you are outside of the community. When you come to the stage of reality, you are committed. You say, “I want to be part of this community. It is where I am called to be, to grow, to love, to help others. I commit myself to the community for good or for evil.” Like in marriage, you are committed. There is nothing more beautiful that a married couple as they go through sufferings, the forgiveness, the trials, the explosions, to finally acquiring comfort in one another.
We must help each one go from the period of community for me, to the period of me for community. But we didn’t do it by ourselves. Only the Spirit can bring change. It’s a gradual permeation of the Almighty, a gradual growth of the Spirit inside us teaching us how to listen to people without prejudice, without judgment, without condemnation.
Through learning about one another, we begin to not just tolerate people, but we accept them and their limits. We must accept people with their speech defects, their difficulties, angers, their criticisms, the way they talk too much. In Edmonton there is a person in the group who talked and talked and talked. Because this person had greatly suffered, there was an anguish that had to come out. For three days they let this person talk. After the third day, he didn’t talk anymore. On the fourth day, this person began listening. The anguish had come out. The people had accepted it. If they had rejected this the first day, he wouldn’t have been able to eventually find peace.
We all have our little ways. Accept that. Someone might be different in time, but today she or he is the way she or he is. One of the errors in education is wanting people to become something we have predetermined instead of accepting them as they are today, with their wounds, with their dates, with their sufferings, with their bad character, with their good character. Accept them as they are, and then we will grow together.
If you are continually comparing the person to the ideal, you are in the stage of deception. Each person is a member of the community as he or she is. You know that they love you and you love them, and that you are growing together. Have confidence in one another. This confidence can grow until it becomes a certainty that they are sacrificing themselves for you as you have been called to sacrifice yourself for them. This sacrifice becomes more that the sacrifice of my television program for theirs, or my French fries for their spaghetti. It is giving my life to my friend, loving each other until death.
This reality of the community growing together means that the barriers between people are gradually falling down and mutual confidence is growing. As soon as the barriers between people begin dropping, then the smile, the look in the eyes, the nonverbal communication begins. You communicate more nonverbally than verbally. This tells much more than the verbal because you know each other so well that you don’t have to express; there is hardly a word that comes out.
People know they have limits but that others accept them anyway. There are no masks; nobody’s pretending to be better than the others’ nobody wants more recognition than the others; nobody is pretending to be other than they are. They are themselves with their poverty and their riches that God has given them. They love each other.
When a person realizes that he or she can’t keep his or her barriers because he or she is in a group where there are no barriers, then his or her barriers drop quickly. If people have no barriers in their being but are open with their limits and their poverty, then others begin doing the same thing and people become themselves. They don’t have to pretend to be. They can just be.
Then comes the discovery that the community is not just a group of people living, working, and learning together, but that here you are my brother or sister in Jesus. Whatever happens to you concerns me. We are precious to each other. If you fall sick, you are still mine. You won’t be rejected by the community. I am committed to you because of some deeper union. As when people get married, it is not because they decide to get married but because they are realizing there is a union which is before their decision – they love each other. They have recognized that this is a union in the spirit of which they are not the master, just as in marriage two people come together because they feel that this is what God wants.
Community in the sense of people ready to die for one another is not a work of man. It is God’s doing. It is a union of which Jesus said, “Love one another the way I have love you” (John 13:34).
Only communities of love can confront the hatred, the division, and the sufferings of this world. This unity will heal deeply wounded people in the community as they sense the joy, the peace, the therapeutic action of love. This is what Jesus is calling us for. He calls us forth as brothers and sisters. How beautiful it is, how good to live as brothers and sisters in unity in a world where there is hatred, in order to become doctors of love and peace.
Reprinted from New Covenant Magazine – January 1978.
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